Rhetoric Fails to Sway Voters on Health

In the rhetorical battle over health care, the forces backing President Barack Obama‘s overhaul have spent years polling and using focus groups to find the precise language that would win over voters — an effort that doesn’t at the moment appear to be working.

When Obama told grass-roots organizers last week that the mandatory purchase of health insurance would “be affordable, based on a sliding scale,” the phrasing precisely mirrored language that had been poll-tested and put before batteries of focus groups by Democratic consultants over the past few years.

The words had been carefully chosen in an effort to take away the rhetorical targets of health-overhaul foes and replace them with terminology that would bring ordinary Americans on board. But under steady attack from opponents using more-emotional language, some of the president’s allies are rethinking the linguistic strategy.

“There are emotions on both sides, and some of these recommendations really avoid connecting to emotion in a way that we hoped would bring the temperature down and disarm opponents,” said John Rother, executive vice president for policy and strategy at AARP, the giant seniors lobby. “I don’t want to second-guess them, but the research is very much a product of where the debate was at the time. Times have changed. Temperatures have gone up.”

An Obama spokesman said at least one member of the administration had met with the group crafting the health-care language, but declined to comment on whether the research had affected Obama’s own language in discussing health care.